Members of the Chilean criminal justice system: Bureaucrats?

This article examines whether (and how) actors within the Chilean criminal justice system can be characterized as bureaucrats. Drawing on anthropological literature on bureaucracies and employing an ethnographic research approach that includes observations conducted in judicial hearings and district attorney’s offices in Santiago, this article examines three characteristics attributed to bureaucracies that apply to the criminal justice system: their effectiveness as producers and managers of a specific type of knowledge-production technology (the law), their efficiency as providers of a specific type of public service, and the discontent generated among citizens due to the gap between their expectations and the objectives attributed to the criminal justice system. The article concludes by arguing that the actors in the criminal justice system are both protectors of the rule of law and “bureaucrats,” such that these two logics, far from being contradictory, reinforce one another.

Keywords
Bureaucracy; Chile; criminal justice system; ethnography